Driving from A to B with Uber, DriveNow or Car2Go, spending the holidays in some stranger’s apartment, booked on AirBnB or Wimdu, using your neighbours bike, found on a local peer2peer platform, and being super fashionable, wearing a designer handbag, rented on Fashionette or Renttherunway – What’s mine is yours.

The Sharing Economy is definitely one of the biggest winners of Digitalisation. Companies, enabling collaborative consumption, are creating new markets and change the way we consume resources every day. Sharing and recycling resources is becoming common practise in our private lives and access and utilization become more important than actual ownership. Investors are throwing their money at companies, developing new business models within the Sharingeconomy – Uber, founded in 2009, and AirBnB, founded in 2008, have a Valuation of $41,2 bilion and $10 bilion and a total equity funding of $4.6 billion and $800 million respectively. How crazy are these numbers? And let’s be honest- sharing is not all about caring ;)

It’s obvious that the Sharingeconomy has already gained a great foothold within the C2C market, people are willing to share their time and assets, and with more and more developing sharing marketplaces, people are becoming even more open to it. However, apart from this being a great business opportunity for startups, there is great potential for existing companies, such as retailers, to benefit from this new generation of consumption. For them, the Sharingeconomy can be a completely new revenue channel. We can already see this to a great extend in the automotive industry. BMW tapped into the Sharingeconomy by partnering up with the car hire company Sixt and rolling out DriveNow. Mercedes introduced a similar sharing concept with Car2Go. Essentially, we will see that the concept and mind-set can be applied to all kinds of industries and markets. Companies will be able to extend their revenue streams if they start renting out their products instead of only selling them. As opposed to the traditional way of sales, the new, modern process for a potential customer to get in touch with a product might look like “I rent, I try I buy”. Not only will this give potential customers a new way to experience their products and decrease the barrier of try-out, but this will also be a great chance for companies to get to know their customers better, interact with them and to learn how they use their products.  This way, companies can also fight the risk of their own customers actually turn into their competitors, by providing their products on P2P marketplaces. This risk is especially high when the products involve a high acquisition cost and are highly underutilized. I’m convinced, that now is the time for companies to develop their own sharing concepts, may it be by bringing additional access options besides the traditional sales channels to the market, or perhaps even by tapping into a B2B-sharing environment.

This actually brings me to the second thought on why companies should get more involved in the Sharing Economy. I would like to relate to a quote by Rachel Botsman, who stated, that “Travis Kalanick (CEO and Co-Founder of Uber) was one of the first to recognise the potential of inventory that already exists”. Essentially, this is summarizing the greatest benefit of the sharing concept – use what’s already there, safe costs or/and earn money and have less waste of resources. So we already saw this benefit gaining a great ground in the consumer-facing industries, however, why shouldn’t it have just the same, if not an even bigger impact in the B2B market? Any company, starting from the 2-person start-up to any multi-billion revenue corporate, owns idle inventory or resources. So some resources, for which I personally believe, sharing between companies makes especially sense are real estate, HR and trucking & manufacturing capacities. In most offices, there are some desks, which are unused at some point during the day. So we have already seen a lot of these co-working spaces appearing, where mainly young Start-ups and freelancers would work, but it might make sense for bigger companies as well. Office sharing allows you to put talent and ideas into one place and gives greater room for out of the box thinking within your company. By sharing offices not only with other departments within your company, but maybe even with other companies, you utilize idle assets (spare office rooms in this case) and might even get a greater creative idea-flow from outside your company by getting employees from different businesses engaged with each other. Moreover, most manufacturing facilities do not operate at their maximum capacity, causing huge amount of losses- so why not make the spare capacity available to others? This has happened naturally in the farming and construction industries for ages – where big, up-front investments are required in heavy equipment assets. Hence, developing B2B sharing agreements would allow these resources, and many more, to be used more efficiently.

So we see, sharing is not limited to individuals. For firms, both large and small, it makes sense to replicate the concept of the P2P Sharing Economy to improve their own businesses. Now, all we need is the right infrastructure to make tapping into the collaborative space easy for firms as well.

On Friday, March the 6^th 2015 Germany’s parliament passed the long discussed legislation, which requires over 100 top German companies to introduce a 30% quota for women on their supervisory boards (non-executive boards), as of January 2016. Companies not meeting the quota will be required to fill vacancies with women or leave the seats empty. Numbers show, that right now, females remain grossly under-represented in managing positions.

In this post I would like to explain my point of view on the whole Women Quota topic. To be clear, I don’t think, there shouldn’t be 30% or more women in top positions but it’s not an issue of women being on boards because they are women. It’s about being on boards because they are competent, skilled and hard-working individuals and the society should be developed enough to let them.

Let’s take a step back and ask ourselves what emancipation actually is. Par definition it’s the act or process of being set free from legal, social or political restrictions. So this is what we were fighting for all these years and now we enforce restrictions ourselves? At least 30% women means a maximum of 70% men – that’s a restriction, isn’t it? Quotas simply are against the principle of equal opportunity for all. Imposing candidates, based on their gender is undemocratic and is discriminating. There will be situations, when the male candidate is actually the better fit, but won’t get the seat because of the quota. I would not like to be in the shoes of the women who will get his place.

What’s more, quotas have a tendency to promote cultural beliefs in essentialism, such as women, who are representing women, can’t represent men, but can present all other women. I think we are getting on the same level as those who have been against empowered women in the past. I am a women, and yes I would consider myself a feminist to some extend, but aren’t we, by asking for a quota, reducing it all down to the gender issue ourselves instead of pulling the problem by its roots? What needs to happen is a complete change in mind-set and this just isn’t something, which can be enforced from one day to another.

I very much agree that something needs to happen, but at the same time I think that this quota is an easy way out and not really reflecting society. Diversity is good and research has shown that diversity in corporate governance leads to greater success, but taking that as an argument, wouldn’t we need more quotas such as for age, heritage and religion just to represent the diversity of society in managing positions? Oh, I almost forgot about hobbies, hair colour and favourite food… Where are we going if we need to put numbers on everything and how is that in any way coherent with the principle of a free market? In Germany the government is deciding about the structure of the board, but who is reliable for the potential damages this might cause? These positions should be filled with the candidates who are the most qualified for it. Maybe we end up with some companies having no women in their top positions and others having a majority over man. Don’t we want to live in a world were anything is possible and neither men, nor women are discriminated and have equal chances? The aim should be, that everyone, who is worth their salt, no matter what, will rise up the ranks automatically. We should not shortcut the process and I think we are on a good way to develop away from an old-fashioned and conservative-minded society. After all I am pretty sure, women are strong enough to prove they deserve that seat, not because of some body difference but because they earned it.